Ninth in an 11-part series examining the vagaries of awards voting. Sal Maglie’s 1956 season combines the “Elston Howard factor” of collecting more MVP votes than worthier candidates largely because his team inched out theirs at the finish line with the ... (Continue reading)
No, they’re not doppelgangers—see my previous article for a fuller explanation—but Carl Hubbell and Juan Marichal—the New York/San Francisco Giants franchise's two greatest pitchers after Christy Mathewson—enjoyed substantially paralleling careers. Bill James’s “similarity score” of 912, which denotes Hubbell and ... (Continue reading)
On December 7, Col. Sherman T. Potter, U.S. Army (Ret.), passed away after a bout of pneumonia. Given that perhaps the most famous home run in baseball history—Bobby Thomson’s October 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”—occurred at the height of ... (Continue reading)